Outsourcing responsibilities: Australia's punitive asylum regime

Australia’s return
to offshore detention and processing centres for asylum seekers signals a
renewed willingness to renege on its responsibilities to vulnerable others. Removing
asylum seekers from national territory also removes the possibility of an
ethical response to their plight.

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At the height of British
imperialism, the problem of overpopulation was solved through the
transportation of society’s outcasts
– those the sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman has described as ‘wasted lives’ – to less populated parts of the
empire. What was then a global solution to a local problem has now been
reversed; in its search for solutions to the global production of refugees,
Australia, which was once a destination for these ‘wasted lives’, has sought to
delegate its responsibilities for their welfare to local and regional partners.
Despite having rowed back on many of the most troubling aspects of its asylum
policy in recent years, the panel of experts appointed by Prime Minister Julia
Gillard to tackle the issue in June this year has recommended a series of
measures which look increasingly regressive.

Protesters at the WoomeraDetention Centre in 2002.Photo: RedUnderTheBed,Free Art Licence.As Matt
Gibney has described, until John Howard’s Liberal government came to power
in 1996, Australia had often exceeded its international obligations to refugees
and considered tackling the problem of forced migration as a key way to
demonstrate that it was taking its international responsibilities seriously.
Over the last twenty or so years, however, Australia’s has become one of the
most punitive asylum systems in the developed world. Governmental efforts to
evade its obligations to the international refugee regime reached crisis point
in 2001 when a Norwegian freighter MV
Tampa, which had picked up 438
ship-wrecked Afghan refugees attempting to reach Australia by boat, was denied
entry to Australian waters. The country’s wide-ranging practices of detention
have also come under international
scrutiny. Woomera detention centre in South Australia, which closed in
2003, provoked an outcry among the Australian public after the extent of its
mistreatment of detainees was revealed.

Revisiting a debate which seems rarely
to be off the agenda in contemporary Australia, the recently published expert
report does attempt to take a more holistic view of forced migration in the
region by recommending increased cooperation with Indonesia and Malaysia to
improve protection for asylum seekers in these countries, the expansion of
Australia’s Humanitarian Program and greater engagement with refugee-producing
countries.

Unfortunately, this welcome emphasis
on dialogue and collaboration is outweighed by a number of recommendations
which lower the standards of the country’s refugee protection regime and
undermine Australia’s authority as an advocate of human rights. These include
turning back boats carrying asylum seekers towards Australia and amendments to
the country’s 1958 Migration Act to allow for all asylum seekers to be taken to
regional processing centres offshore, regardless of whether they arrive in
excised territory or the mainland. This latter recommendation, which has now
been enshrined in Australian law, includes ‘the removal of provisions
stipulating the minimum conditions which must be met if a country is to be
designated for offshore processing’. As the Refugee Council points out in its response
to the panel’s document, this means there are now no guarantees that those
asylum seekers taken to offshore locations will be treated according to
international law on refugee protection.

One of the report’s most
controversial recommendations is the reopening of offshore detention and
processing centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Reprising John Howard’s
‘Pacific Solution’, which Gillard vociferously condemned on a ‘matter
of principle’ in opposition, the return to these measures signals a renewed
willingness to outsource responsibilities for refugees and to renege on
international obligations to protect their human rights. Headed up by a former
defence chief, Angus Houston, the panel and its recommendations testify to the
ongoing political entanglement of asylum issues and national security. In this
case, national defences must be shored up by shipping the perceived threat
offshore.

Of course, this practice of
‘outsourcing’ is not exclusive to Australia. The shift in focus among
refugee-receiving countries in Europe from post-entry controls – such as
in-country detention and dispersal – to concerted efforts to prevent entry has
led to surprising amounts of cooperation from nations often at odds on other
issues; what Daniéle
Joly has called ‘harmonised restrictionism’. In a newspaper article for The Times in 2001 Tony Blair called for
a renegotiation of the 1951 Refugee Convention to allow for asylum claims to be
processed outside the European Union in what Gibney describes as ‘warehousing
countries’. Similarly, a controversial ‘Friendship
Treaty’ brokered between Italy and Libya in 2009 allowed for the removal to
Libya of asylum seekers arriving in Italy in exchange for infrastructure
investment which, one imagines, would cover the cost of building detention
centres on Libya’s coast. These outsourcing measures have resulted in the
proliferation of both makeshift and institutionally-sanctioned camps at sites
on the borders of Europe where the flow of people is greatest: Lampedusa,
Malta and Sicily to name but a few.

Offshore processing and
detention centres allow signatory nations to defer, delegate and devolve their
responsibilities to international refugee protection regimes and so raise a
number of pressing material concerns about the need to guarantee the rights of
asylum seekers. Conceptually speaking, however, the notion of being ‘offshore’
also describes the challenging condition of statelessness in times which,
despite the often-anticipated demise of the nation-state, remain determined by
conceptions of national sovereignty. Although in practice ‘offshore’ often
corresponds to an identifiable location – Libya, Papua New Guinea – it is also
a conceptual ‘elsewhere’ which allows governments to conceal their
responsibilities to those seeking refuge. Globalising forces have rendered the relationships
between refugee-producing countries and those receiving them both more visible
and more complex. What offshoring practices demonstrate, however, are
the ways in which refugee-receiving countries are ever keener to reverse this
trend by hiding their interactions with those claiming refuge. The non-place of
‘offshore’ not only exacerbates the negative effects of statelessness in a
world which remains primarily organised around sovereign nations, but also
removes the possibility of a confrontation between an ostensibly nationally and
socially cohesive body and an outsider who asks for refuge.

For philosopher Emanuel
Levinas, it is precisely in being confronted with ‘the fact of the other’
that our ethical responsibilities become clear. Only in coming face to face
with what Levinas calls ‘the widow, the orphan, the stranger’, can we
understand the extent of our ethical responsibility to others as well as the
enormous challenges posed by the possibility of living up to it. Whether we
respond to this confrontation generously or, in Simon
Critchley’s words, we ‘pass them by on the street, silently wishing they
were somehow invisible and wincing internally at [our] callousness’, the
interaction nonetheless provides the opportunity for ethical action and
self-questioning. This is precisely the reason why offshoring is so troubling:
because in removing the possibility of an encounter between citizens and asylum
seekers, we also remove the possibility of ethical action on their behalf.

This process is being replicated
on a global scale. Despite the consensus among liberal democracies that the
responsibility to vulnerable others is one that should be borne, governments
persist in legislating against a confrontation with this ethical challenge by
detaining and socially segregating asylum seekers. It seems that by contriving
scenarios which ensure the invisibility of vulnerable others, nation-states
absolve themselves of the obligation to safeguard their basic rights. Offshore
locations not only suspend asylum seekers in a state of transience,
precariousness and semi-legality, but they also remove ethics and
responsibility from the realm of everyday lived experience.

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